The poignancy of culling books
03 February 2011
Every so often it has to happen - just like going to the dentist. As new volumes start to mount up as I research my forthcoming book with Preface 'How Britain's Railways Won the War', so something has to give. Otherwise I run the risk of an occupational injury from tottering piles on the floor of my study. (Some of the chaos can be glimpsed over my shoulder in my author pic!). But what to get rid of? For me books, no matter how old and tatty, are evocative chapters in a lifetime - which electronic downloads can never be. Here is the scuffed copy of Orwell's essays given to me by an English teacher who set me off on my path to a career as a journalist, and the faded orange Stan Barstow paperback inscribed by my first serious girlfriend. Here, too, is my grandmother's disintegrating King James Bible and the battered Penguin of Ulysses that I thrilled to on a jolting bus journey from Scotland to London, which i can remember to this day. All of them worthless in themselves. but oh so valuable...
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